Alena Roberts recently featured oMoby on her Blind Perspective blog. oMoby is intended as a shopping app, but as Alena has suggested it can have other uses for people with visual impairments. oMoby uses the iPhone/iPod touch 4G camera to snap a picture of any product you come across while shopping. The picture is then compared against a database and oMoby will provide you with a list of possible products/items. The fact that you don’t have to scan a bar code for this app to work makes it easier fo use for someone with low vision who might not be able to properly locate the bar code.
I had to try oMoby for myself to see how it works, and I was blown away with how well this app performs. Just like Alena, I wanted to see if I could use the app as a replacement for a currency identifier. I tried the app with both $1 and $5 bills and both times it accurately identified them. It had a more difficult time with coins (it could not correctly identify a quarter, only telling me that it was a silver coin). While not perfect for this purpose, oMoby is pretty good consideirng it is a free app.
The other thing to point out about oMoby is that I found it to work well with VoiceOver, the screen reader now included with all new iPod touch and iPhone models. So, to sum up, oMoby is a shopping app that has the potential to replace a much more expensive currency identifier used by those with visual impairments, and it can do it for $0 dollars. Not a bad deal.
Here is the link for it on the Apple Store.
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